Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

My mother is dead. I always knew from the twist in my father’s face, from his fundamental coldness, that she had died and bequeathed him a tragedy with which to define himself for the rest of his years. And me, of course. I was paramount to his tragedy. Now I go to the door of the shut-up-and-locked room and I stand outside fingering the handle. I look down to the draught snake and I look up to the cracks in the ceiling plaster. I feel as though there’s something I was going to say, but it escapes me. And so, I go back to the rocking chair.

To the left of my brain compendium, there are a few practical items: underpants and the camping cooker, kibble and gas, my father’s slippers, a pebble jar, the low chair and the football, your precious food bowl. To the left, there is you. Of course there is you.

Now you hop into my lap. And together, we rock.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘it’ll be okay.’

We are driving, driving, driving.

Over hillslopes and humpback bridges, through loose chippings and potholes wide as children’s paddling pools and deep as old people’s graves. Past lavender hedges, betting shops, sports grounds. Past countless closed doors behind which are countless uncaring strangers, their lives going on and on and on, relentlessly. We are heading inland, keeping to the back roads as much as possible. You are looking out the rear window where the view is best, or perching on the passenger seat with your maggot pressed to the air vents. What do you smell? Fox spray and honeysuckle, pine martens and stinkhorns, seven different kinds of sap? Riding in the car is like watching a neverending reel at a wraparound cinema, complete with the surround-sound of engine putter, the piped scent of petrol fumes and passing countryside.

We are driving, driving, driving.

And the wraparound car screen is reeling off monkey puzzle trees and peeling eucalyptus, parish halls and handball alleys. Here’s a pair of running shoes tied by the laces and slung over a phone wire above the road. Here’s a steel grain silo at the edge of a farmyard, nose pointed to the moon like a shoddy rocket. Now here’s a crucifix set in concrete with a vase full of shrivelled stalks in front, a roadside memorial shrine. The plaque’s too small to read but what it means is that somebody died here. On this most seemingly non-treacherous of corners with a cow field either side, some stranger evacuated their vessel for good. What it means is that even the tattered verges are depositories of celebration and devastation in unequal measure.

We are driving, driving, driving.

And every time the engine stops, you expect we’ve reached the end. But each stop is never an arrival, just another pause along the way. A snack, a walk, a smoke, a sleep, and off again. Now we piss in the hedgerows, side by side. Shit in the dykes under the cover of dark, side by side. I understand you’re confused, that you had settled into a routine and now it’s hard to fathom the new nook where your food bowl lives, the altered angle of your safe space and the way the view is ever rushing, changing. It’s hard for me too. I hurt to the core of my bones from trying to sleep in the rolled-back driver’s seat. I still haven’t found an efficient way to fold my limbs, nor decided which is the more comfortable side to lean on. My body snaps and creaks louder than the radio and I tend to nod off on dual carriageways. The car wavers onto the white lines and the cat’s eyes bonk beneath our wheels. BONKbonk, BONKbonk, BONKbonk, and I wake to the red twigs of the dogwood shrubs clawing our paintwork. But it’s not only sleeping that’s hard, it’s everything. It’s hard to learn anew how to make it through from dawn to dark without all of the props and pointers inside my father’s house. Without plant-watering, yard-pottering, chair-rocking and channel-zapping. I expected it would be exciting; I expected that the freedom from routine was somehow greater than the freedom to determine your own routine. I wanted to get up in the morning and not know exactly what I was going to do that day. But now that I don’t, it’s terrifying. Now nothing can be assumed, now everything’s ill-considered, and if I spend too long thinking it makes my eyes smart and molars throb. I tense myself into a stone and forget how to breathe. I pull the car to the side of the road and put my flashers on. I list aloud all the things that are good and all the reasons I must go on. Glass pebbles are good, games of football on deserted strands, oil refineries by night, jumble shop windows, gingernuts, broken buoys, nicotine, fields of flowering rape. And I must go on because of you. Now it’s okay; I can breathe again. And on we go. I put distance in front of my face and my body has no choice but to follow, unthinkingly, and your body too. Is this how people cope, I wonder. Is this how everybody copes?

We are driving, driving, driving.

And the wraparound car screen is reeling off fields and fields and fields, of wheat and oats and barley which have all died now, and in death, turned to gold. Torn filaments of their gold blows to the ditches, sticks in the prickles, dangles and glitters like premature tinsel.

We are driving, driving, driving.

And the car is our house now, home. The boot is our attic. The loose chippings are our floorboards. The sun roof is our balcony. The back roads and hinterlands are our ceaselessly surging view.

My father didn’t teach me to drive until I was in my forties and he’d started to suffer from gouty feet. It was the twinge in each gigantic foot that caused him to foresee a time when he’d require a personal chauffeur. I used to grant him nobler reasons, now I see this was the only reason. Learning to drive was the most gruelling thing I’ve ever done. I mastered the simultaneous operation of pedals, gear-stick, steering wheel, indicator and mirror easily enough. I trained alone by patting my head and rubbing my belly. The difficult part was sitting in a confined space with my father looking on as I made mistake after mistake after mistake. He’d bellow instructions and mutter and smoke in the passenger seat. He’d slam his heels to the floor every time he feared I’d fail to break, every time I grazed the undergrowth because the passenger window was obscured by smoke. He’d grasp the door handle and squeeze so viciously his fist left a dent in the supple upholstery. Because I was allowed barely any opportunities to practice, it took me three years before I was confident enough to sit with a licensing official in the passenger seat instead of my father, before I obtained my first ever document of identification. The official was a bald man with librarian spectacles. He barely spoke and appeared to be immensely distressed even before he climbed into the car, which set me somewhat irrationally at ease. I imagined he had a wicked wife who had dramatically walked out on him just before he came to work. His state of shock was such that he overlooked every mistake and carelessly passed me. It was a Monday and the date was September 19th. That was the day I became a person; I still believe I owe it to a licensing official’s unfaithful wife.

The season of falling foliage kicks off with falling rain instead. And a wind so ferocious it shakes down leaves that aren’t yet dead enough to drop. It wrenches away stalks still green to the tips, still being fed by mother trunk, and off they blow. Somewhat less decorously, old fat and rotted branches belly-flop into the electricity supply lines. Now all the surrounding houses are swamped by dark. The people inside are eating their dinner out of yoghurt pots and going to bed un-showered. They’re lying awake listening to the plip-plip-plop of petit-pois and chicken drippers musically defrosting. It’s a power cut, but then I don’t suppose you ever understood where the small ceiling suns in each of my rooms came from in the first place. I don’t suppose you ever pondered the working of the magic switches.